The Final Frontier: Queens; Museum's Rockets Return After a Tuneup in Ohio

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: October 3, 2003

You can see a lot of strange things on a New York City street, but on Wednesday night there was something almost literally out of this world.

Two extra-long flatbed trucks rumbled into Manhattan looking as if they had made a wrong turn at Cape Canaveral. Each truck carried a vintage rocket built four decades ago to soar into space, a voyage that some days seems less difficult than a trip across Midtown.

The rockets -- an Atlas and a Titan 2, each roughly 100 feet long -- had been refurbished in Ohio and were being brought back to be reinstalled outside the New York Hall of Science, on the western edge of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.

Getting there required taking a lengthy and windy route through Manhattan and Brooklyn.

''Oh, New York was definitely the roughest part of the two-day trip,'' said Frank Corsaro, 47, who drove the truck carrying the Titan. ''We had traffic and cabbies cutting us off. People were actually stopping us asking if these were nuclear missiles for the war. It was ridiculous.''

The rockets were first installed at the Hall of Science as an exhibit in the United States Space Park for the 1964 World's Fair, and eventually became a prime attraction of the Hall of Science.

But over the years they became decrepit, filthy and infested with pigeons. By the 1990's, they were more faded kitsch than gleaming majestic testaments to the boldness of the space age.

Their frameworks had deteriorated and the rockets were structurally unsound, said the Hall of Science's director, Alan J. Friedman.

The two rockets, which are essentially empty shells without their fuel tanks, are supported by internal frames for exhibition. ''The Atlas actually had a wooden interior frame that had become infested with termites,'' Dr. Friedman said. ''We considered donating them to an aviation museum, but the people of New York have such an affection for the rockets, we realized that couldn't happen.''

In 2001, they were removed and trucked to Akron, Ohio, for a $2 million restoration job by Thomarios, a specialty construction company. Workers built and installed new frames and foundations so the rockets would no longer need wires for support and could withstand winds up to 125 miles per hour.

Workers also replaced many exterior panels on the spacecraft and power-washed them before applying paint and coating to protect them.

Both rockets were made for the Air Force in 1961 to carry nuclear warheads, said Louis Chinal, a space historian from Staten Island who was hired as a consultant on the project. Instead, NASA acquired them to put astronauts into orbit under the Mercury and Gemini space programs. They were never used and ended up being donated for display at the World's Fair.

The Titan rocket has a mock fiberglass flight capsule, but the Atlas rocket was equipped by NASA with an original Mercury flight capsule used atop another rocket in a short unmanned flight in 1960 in Virginia to test an escape mechanism. During the recent refurbishment, that capsule was removed for display at the center, and a fiberglass replica has replaced it on the rocket.

Dr. Friedman called the rockets ''a visual symbol of science and technology.''

''They bring back for another generation the excitement a lot of us felt for the space program,'' he said. ''These have always grabbed the attention of children and adults whose greatest dream is to blast off to another universe. They are visible and visceral and proof that science can be big and beautiful and even dangerous.''

The rockets were reinstalled yesterday in their familiar spot next to the center. A crane lifted both rockets, now strengthened and shiny, off the flatbeds and onto sturdy new bases.

The Atlas, 93 feet of stainless steel, was guided onto its 10-foot-high platform as a group of onlookers in lawn chairs cheered. Then the Titan, with its new black, white and gray paint job, was installed.

''They're back, the twin towers of Queens,'' said Bob Lantier, 50, who lives near the center. ''I grew up with these rockets. They're like family. I missed them every day they were away.''

The Hall of Science is undergoing a $68 million, five-year expansion. As the crane lifted the Titan near the center's new 55,000-square-foot addition yesterday, gusts of wind made the rocket swing back and forth.

The scene inspired awe in Jonas Toleikis, 6, a first grader from Manhattan, who mused that the rockets could take him ''to outer space to see stars and stuff.''

Elijah Wood, 7, a second grader from Port Washington, N.Y., said the experience made him want to become an astronaut.

His mother, Laura Kaye, 45, said she brought him because ''my father brought me here when I was his age, and I wanted to give my son the same thing.''

Photos: Rockets passed Lincoln Center Wednesday night, above, and were put up at the New York Hall of Science in Queens yesterday. (Photographs by George M. Gutierrez for The New York Times)